Saturday, September 03, 2005

In New Orleans, our lives were defined by water

This is a New Orleans guy who writes for the Tribune. He describes perfectly what it is that gets under your skin and makes you adore New Orleans, particularly if you grew up there, and your parents grew up there...

By Kerry Luft
Tribune foreign editor

The house where I grew up sits on a New Orleans street called Tchoupitoulas, a Native American term that means "people who live by the river."

My mother grew up in the house next door. So did her mother. My father's boyhood home is on the same street, five blocks away.

You could see the wharves that line the Mississippi River from our front door, the steam stacks of the freighter boats soaring far above the warehouse walls. We heard their horns blare in the night as they queued to fill their holds with grain and headed back down the river to the sea.

It never occurred to us how odd it was that those giant ships sailed on water that flowed above our heads, on the other side of a levee that held back the mighty river that gave the city life and its reason for existence. Nor did it seem strange that every year or so, we spent a late-summer night behind boarded-up windows with kerosene lanterns and flashlights at the ready, watching the track of a hurricane that always skidded past.

Our lives were defined by water.

When you grew up in New Orleans, you abandoned the conventional directions of north, south, east and west. Instead you went "uptown," meaning upstream; or "towards the lake" or "back to the river." For vacation you went "across the lake." You fished and swam in Lake Pontchartrain, you ate boiled crabs and fried shrimp in restaurants built on piers jutting over the same lake, and you kissed your first girlfriend at the top of the levee, looking out over the river from your bicycle at the end of what was perhaps the first truly perfect day in your life.

Now the water has defined our lives again, in a way we sometimes thought about but never anticipated, and those of us who grew up in New Orleans wonder whether there will ever be another truly perfect day.

The New Orleans that the tourist knows is different from the one I love. There are some common elements between the two, like the mysterious romance of the French Quarter, the briny tang of a cold raw oyster, and the miracles that can be achieved through the confluence of fresh seafood, a dusting of spices and far too much butter.

But my New Orleans, the one where I grew up, is more about a corner bar with terrific po' boy sandwiches than a linen tablecloth and fine wines, more about homes filled with laughing, generous people than bars packed with drunken conventioneers, and more about quiet side streets with leafy playgrounds and parks than raucous Bourbon Street and its tawdry sideshows.

When the terrible news began to emerge last week, I realized that it was this New Orleans, the one where the people lived and the tourists never went, that was most in danger.

I turned to the Internet and its blogs, frantically searching for news of the nursing home where my mother rode out the storm in her wheelchair, her mind lost in the mists of Alzheimer's disease. I pored over every news report, which may have been a mistake. Every photograph seemed to be of a spot I knew, every bulletin a touchstone. I knew too much, and my knowledge haunted me.

The water is rising in Carrollton, where I played baseball as a boy.

The floodwaters have reached City Park Avenue, near the lagoon where I caught my first bass.

The 17th Street Canal has breached the levee, near the spot where one of my scoutmasters lived, and I am certain that I saw the eaves of his house poking out above the water during a television report.

Looters raided a nursing home, right around the corner from my father's house and across the street from the store where I bought my first bicycle.

I read that many of the giant, gnarled oak trees that line historic St. Charles Avenue and other Uptown streets had toppled in the wind, and I thought of how my father has walked beneath them every Mardi Gras for 55 years as a member of his beloved marching club. I walked alongside him as a little boy, and I punish myself now for not walking beside him in this year's parade, when he was the grand marshal. He may march again down those streets, but it will not, cannot be the same.

A bridge I drove across hundreds of times in my youth is gone too, washed into the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain. On the other side was the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where my family had a little cabin not far from the beach in a sleepy town called Bay St. Louis, where quail chirped their liquid song in the early morning and the clean smell of the sea washed ashore on the night breeze. For a little boy who loved to fish and wander in the woods, it was magic.

Bay St. Louis is no longer there.

Yet that awful fact reminds me that I am lucky. My father and brother evacuated to Memphis before Katrina arrived, and they are now with me in my Evanston home. My mother's nursing home survived the storm, and she is in Houston under the care of people who can help her far more than we can, as painful as that thought might be.

Other people lost everything. Too many of them had almost nothing in the first place.

The wrenching video and photographs that flashed around the world last week revealed a secret truth about New Orleans. It is one of the nation's poorest cities, and in an especially cruel twist, much of the catastrophic flooding affected the poorest of the poor. I am certain that most of the people who took refuge in the darkened, steamy Superdome never had stepped inside the building before, unless they had hawked beer and peanuts at a Super Bowl or Final Four.

The French Quarter may make it. Reports indicated that the flooding was not so bad there, though it is unclear whether the foundations of 200-year-old buildings can withstand such a soaking. So, too, might the hotels, because they are backed by billion-dollar corporations with insurance policies. Beloved restaurants like Commander's Palace or Emeril's may survive too, because after all, it is New Orleans.

But the people who worked at those hotels and restaurants, who lugged suitcases upstairs and cleaned rooms and waited on tables ... so many of them lived in those houses now under several feet of fetid, toxic water. There may be jobs for them when they return, if they return, but where will they live?

My father will probably return to his sturdy brick house by the docks. In one of the greatest ironies of New Orleans, the land nearest the river is the highest in the city, and so his home likely was spared. Yet as I give thanks for that, I cannot help but think about the night we drove down Tchoupitoulas Street, bringing a friend of mine home for dinner.

As we rode, my friend peered out the window at the wharves and the ships, so close you could throw a stone and hit them. "Just how close do you live to the river?" he asked.

My father paused. "Some years, four blocks," he said. "Other years, two blocks."

I have repeated that line many times as a perfect example of my father's bone-dry wit and the laissez-faire, what-me-worry attitude of the native New Orleanian. Today it is a painful memory, a hollow joke that I will never tell again.

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune